Maigret and his wife are first seen driving along on a bright winter’s day. Their destination: Commissaire Maigret’s old home town.

His interest has been piqued by an anonymous letter which says that a crime will be committed in the church of Saint-Fiacre during Mass. Madame Maigret reminds her husband that the police ordinarily discard such missives, but Maigret presses on.

Attending an All Souls’ Day service the next day, Maigret and the congregation witness the Comtesse de Saint-Fiacre collapse and die in the church. The Comtesse and her late husband had been Maigret’s father’s employer when he was young — but like most teenagers Maigret couldn’t wait to escape small town life for the bright lights of the big city, which he did the first chance he got.

The jaded and sarcastic doctor certifies that the Comtesse has died of a heart attack, and informs a skeptical Maigret that it had been a chronic condition with her for years.

Other people also fall under Maigret’s suspicion: the Comtesse’s “secretary” (a euphemism for her boy toy), the estate’s steward and his banker son, the local priest, and the secretary’s lawyer. Through the steward and his son Maigret learns that the Comtesse was nearly broke.

Mysteriously, the missal (a prayer book) that the Comtesse had with her when she died disappears. In the event, this missing missal will prove not simply to be a CLUE to what Maigret is now convinced is a murder, he’s certain the innocent prayer book is actually the murder WEAPON….

I’d hate to be the French judge tasked with determining culpability in this case; a charge of Murder One would likely never be upheld.

It’s interesting that this story has the classic Golden Age gathering of all the suspects at the end, but differs in having someone else instead of the master detective doing the big reveal — but at Maigret’s direction, we hasten to add.

The character of Maigret stands in proud second place to Sherlock Holmes when it comes to the number of film adaptations using him.

The French-Czech Maigret series was originally scheduled to run to 104 fairly faithful-to-the-original stories, but the series’ star Bruno Cremer (1929-2010) fell ill roughly halfway through. Cremer, known in Europe for his tough guy roles, was cast against type as Maigret, but the public loved his portrayal. (Something similar has happened with Terence Hill, star of many violent spaghetti Westerns, who is currently playing a mild-mannered violence-averse Italian Father Brown-type in the Don Matteo series.)

Other film versions of this story include “Maigret on Home Ground” (1992, one of a 12-episode English language series starring Michael Gambon) and Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (a 1959 movie with Jean Gabin).

I kind of picture Maigret as looking like Jean Gabin, but after watching that short video clip, I think I could easily get along with Bruno Cremer in the role.

Chances are you’ll need a multi-region player to watch the series on DVD, along with a tolerance for reading subtitles on the small screen. But I have the first and have grown somewhat used to the second. I’ll have to look into it.

The French box sets of 10 dvds each are widely available but you do not need a multi-region player. The region one box sets have started to be issued in boxes of 6 dvds each. The first set came out in February and the second in June. The third and fourth are scheduled for August release.

Amazon.com stocks them and these first four box sets will contain a total of 24 episodes which is almost half of the series. The rest may follow later in the year.

You and Walker seem to be talking about the same set of DVDs. Issued by MHz Worldview, they are indeed Region 1, which I hadn’t known about before, but they are in French with English subtitles, as I’d assumed.

Looking for them on Amazon, they’re pricey, but if you decide to go with third party sellers, you can get the first set of six DVDs for something not much over $36, including postage.

Steve says, “I’m tempted, but so far I’ve resisted.” Often I’ve thought this also but as I’ve stumbled somehow into old age, I’ve started to think, “What am I saving my money for?”

A long standing friend of mine, a guy I was friends with for 40 years, saved his money and when he died his children blew his hard earned savings within a very short time. Mainly on cruises and vacations. It’s a shame he couldn’t have pulled the trigger and spent his money on himself. He deserved it.

Well, if I don’t buy the MAIGRET DVDs, there are others that keep coming out that the money can go for, not to mention bootlegs, new books and old, pulps and pulp reprints, jazz and folk CDs, and even food. It’s not hard to find stuff to spend it on!